A fictional imagining of composer Erik Satie’s life is creepy and
claustrophobic, finds Lucy Daniel

If you were allowed to take only one memory with you into the afterlife, what would you choose? A difficult question for anyone, but if you are Erik Satie, illustrious avant-garde composer and notable absinthe-swilling eccentric, the question has extra-peculiar complications.

Satie was known in 1890s Montmartre as “The Velvet Gentleman” because for seven years he wore the same velvet corduroy suit and hat (or rather seven identical ones in rotation). Richard Skinner’s story about Satie begins with the provocative announcement, “I died yesterday”.

What follows is an account of Satie’s sojourn in limbo. After his death from liver failure aged 59, he finds himself at a monochrome waystation, among numerous fellow travellers. Before they can leave to face eternity, each person is tasked with choosing one memory to preserve. The limbo authorities then make props and sets to recreate the moment and capture it for ever on film.

As Skinner acknowledges, this plot is very similar to the 1998 Japanese film Afterlife. The film has nothing to do with Satie, but its central conceit suits the composer wonderfully well, since his life was richly scattered with legendary moments, and peopled by the celebrities of turn-of-the-century Paris. There is the moment in 1887 when he entered the Chat Noir cabaret in Montmartre and introduced himself as “Erik Satie, gymnopédiste” (in lieu of having any recognisable profession), or the moment, a long time later, when he first met Man Ray and promptly created with him the first of the American artist’s “readymades”.

Satie chats with the waystation’s other temporary residents and hears their more predictable choices – the birth of a child, a night in a bordello. Forced to remember his own life, “I feel a scuttling in my chest. What a ghastly, grisly task!”

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Nevertheless, he proves an affable teller of his life story. Skinner relies heavily on the real facts of Satie’s life. His memories take in his great 30-year friendship with Debussy, his dismissal of Cocteau (with whom he collaborated on the ballet Parade, alongside Picasso and Diaghilev) as an arriviste. They weave in the genesis of his compositions, from the now famous strains of his Gymnopédies (three pieces he describes as “like walking round a piece of sculpture and viewing it from three different angles”), to his aptly named Vexations, designed to take 28 hours to perform, a repetitious “spiritual conundrum” forcing the pianist to experience the “depths and mysteries” of boredom.

The irony is that Satie’s life also became curiously “eventless”. It was a life of solitude and asceticism, and strange hobbies. He lived in penury. As Skinner puts it, he spent the last 27 years of his life in one room, a room that no other person entered: “I took to my room and let small things evolve slowly.”

From the suburb of Arcueil, he walked to Paris and back every day, a 10km trip. His room was like a medieval monk’s cell, in which he indulged his love of plainchant and heraldry, his practice of alchemy and of artistic hoaxes, his attempt to eat only white foods, his secret passion for drawing fanciful miniature citadels and chateaux, hidden worlds, “sites for infinite meditation”.

His one and only affaire du coeur was a six-month relationship with Marie-Clémentine Valadon, his “Biqui”, a trapeze artist, model for Renoir and Degas, and professional painter. Skinner says Satie thought love a kind of sickness.

He turned his zealotry to musical theories such as his “phonometrics”: “With my phonometer in hand, I work with joy & with assurance. On the phono-scales, a common-or-garden F sharp gives a reading of 93 kilograms… One day, I envisage an instrument so sensitive at measuring the weight of sounds that we will be able to hear the remains of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount.”

Later he recalls his outrage when an audience sat and appreciated his “furniture music”, after he had instructed them to ignore it. In the waystation’s film studio, he remembers Entr’acte, the technically ambitious and very funny dada film he really made in 1924, the year before his death, with Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp and René Clair (featuring a runaway hearse – another afterlife adventure).

“The Velvet Gentleman” is published here with another story with which it seemingly has little in common. “The Mirror” is about a novice nun in Venice in 1511. There are tinges of the uncanny, strains of the gothic, to both stories. In each there are corridors and locked doors it would be best not to pry into.

Skinner’s prose has the strangely contradictory quality of being so clear and crystalline that you feel it must be hiding something. It’s an effect that is, like the settings of both these highly unusual tales, creepingly claustrophobic.

Skinner gives Satie a fittingly surreal send-off. He was a dreamer and probably some kind of genius, striving, strangely, towards whiteness and silence.